Aging and Death: A Late Night's Conversation!

ARTSY!

I'm going to dive into some material that goes out of the norm for this blog. I'm going to talk about the concepts of aging and death. How morbid, how cliche, how depressing- but I've been thinking about them a lot lately. That doesn't mean that I have been sad or re-living the cultural rennaisance that was the Emo scene of the early to mid 200's- I've just been thinking about them conceptually.

Many people older than me have told me that I should be happy I have all the energy I have now, because when I get older, it's just not there. Whenever people tell me this, I always think "Whatever, it will always be there!" I can't think of feeling any different than I do now. One thing that a great friend and mentor of the mine over the years said to me once that really stuck out was "I'm 56 years old. But the truth is, I don't really feel any different than I did when I was your age".

The concept of feeling different, of being essentially a different person as you mature has always been an idea that's fascinated me, even as a child. We change as we get older, even if we don't feel it. This was evidenced recently in my own life by cold, hard data.

The other night I decided on going through the dangerous and cringe inducing endeavor of downloading all my Facebook data and reading through every status I have ever posted. The guy I was in 2006 turned out to be a very different person than the guy I am today. I was a loud-mouthed, crude, attention starved idiot- exactly the type of person I actively avoid if I can help it.

An artist's rendition of my friends and I in 2006.

Now, I like to think that I'm more tactful, I'm more intelligent, and I'm a lot more mature. Those that know me will likely tell me that I'm the same old jerk that you've grown up with your whole life. But the thing is, I've changed.

Change in real life isn't like the movies- I don't just come to a huge epiphany one day and decide to do things differently. Rather, change in human lives seems to be the result of tiny events, experiences, thoughts and ideas that gradually collect on you like dust. Those that use the internet heavily are very familiar with a process called torrenting. In torrenting, you download a file, but rather than download the file in one chunk, you're downloading thousands and thousands of tiny pieces of the file from hundreds of people that have some or all of the file already downloaded. These pieces eventually assemble into a whole, complete file. This is what maturing and changing seems to be like in human life- except the "file" doesn't actually complete until your death.

Much of my reflection on aging and health is a result of my new job at the hospital. At the hospital, I help people that don't have health insurance apply for state assistance, or help them get help from the hospital's charity fund. Many of the patients I see have page-long problem lists- it's very common for me to see a patient with emphyzema, diabetes, arthritis, depression and hypertension. Some of these patient's health problems are due to life choices they've made, such as inactiveness and years of smoking, and some of it is because of aging.

Your body is on a very common journey of slowly breaking down. As you age, your body parts start to not produce as much bile, process lactose as well or break down chemicals as easily. If you have health insurance, this may require you to visit the doctor on a regular basis to do maintenance on these body parts. Eventually, the body parts just fail all together, and you die.

The idea of my own health eventually failing is very scary to me. I know many people that always get sick. They always have a cold, or a cough or some weird stomach problem that prohibits them from hanging out with me.  God and nature have blessed me with the disposition of rarely getting ill. I get sick about once every couple of years, and when I do, it's a week of bed-ridden disgustingness. I think my body goes for a while without installing essential updates, and has to get sick to figure out what all the new threats are in the world and build immunities to them. Is that how biology works?

"No, it's not."

 Right now, I have the energy to stay awake until 4 a.m., get up at 8, work a full day at work, cook dinner and work out. In a few short years, I may not "be up for it" anymore. I may get winded easier from tasks that were once simple, or have to split a 12 hour marathon drive to visit my in laws into two days because I "just can't handle the drive like I could in my twenties". I hope I never have to suffer this fate!

The simple fact is that your body just can't do the things it used to do as it marches through time. You're a battery slowly wearing down it's charge. I think it's better to process these ideas and think about them when you're young than to have them pop up on you when you get older.

I see this happen often to older people, specifically in my grandparent's generation that went through the Great Depression. I remember reading in one of my Human Diversity classes in college that adults from this generation place huge amounts of stock in hard work, perseverance and self-reliance due to the extremely difficult times they had to go through. They work hard, and live to work.

My father told me that his father and grandfather didn't really think of the concepts of work and leisure to be separate from one another. You live to work- all your socializing was done there, and you were your job. You worked to provide for your family, but you also worked because it's kinda just what there was to do. From my observations, my generation seems to view work as a curse- it's something you do to provide the means to enjoy your life and support the hobbies you enjoy. I agree 100% with the latter idea-I despise the idea of living just to work, but elderly people aren't in agreement with me.

How I picture every job in the 30's and 40's.

One of the saddest things for me to think about is old people that once lived hard working, intense lives get to the point where they simply can't do the activities that made up the rhythm of their days. Their thinking isn't as clear, their hands aren't as fast and the muscle memory and motor reflexes they had as young adults in their prime is delayed. I think where this generation also runs into problems is that they don't really talk about how they feel- there's a lot of cognitive dissonance going on, and they tell themselves that they can still do all the things they used to do- they're not old, dammit! Eventually, come it hard or soft, they make the realization that there are some things they physically and mentally are unable to do anymore. It's a tragedy- a very common, common tragedy that if we all survive long enough will have to deal with one day.

And then there's death. The thing about death is that there's no way of knowing what death feels like. We can try to gather facts and reports and biological data, but we'll never know what it feels like to die until it actually happens. For my fellow Christians, presumably we'll go up to heaven when our light flickers out. But who knows the process of how this works+? Where does our consciousness go? Does dying hurt, or is it painless?

When I think of myself dying, it goes a little something like this. I'm in a bed, and my kids and family members are around me. I'm wrinkled and wearing one of those tractor hats that old guys always have on, even though I'm in bed. My eyes close, and when I open them I'm in this vast spanse of muted white, and then I'm pulled into a vortex. I'm also wearing one of those old night gowns for the Lord knows what reason. Then, I find myself in a waiting room similar to a doctor's office. I sit in a chair in there for about two hours, and then the lady at the receptionist desk tells me that I can go into Heaven now. I walk past the stereotypical pearly gates in the clouds. Studies into the brain cells of dying individuals have shown that this is actually what happens when a person passes away.

Many people that die seem to die because their health fails- they get cancer or have a stroke or heart attack, or get in a car accident and don't pull through. Put what about those lucky enough not to deal with all this stuff? I always have found it strange to think about people who just die in their sleep. Their body is just done existing, and shuts off. I'm sure there's actually a medical term for this, and science has a lot of ways to explain when people die like this. But just let me get off on my pretentious existential kick here for a bit, will you?

Death and aging are the most common things in the world, but humanity hates thinking about them. Perhaps it's because the realm of death is still completely unknown, despite all the depictions of it in the arts, religion, and attempts to understand it through science. It's terrifying to think that you'll stop existing one day. From time to time though, I think it's good to stop and reflect on it. It's a sobering thought.

One of the most oft repeated and abused poems in heavy handed and ultimately irritating crap like I'm writing now is a little piece called "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Here it is:

"I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

A guy that got way too into the above poem. 

Think about all the great countries, people and empires that you've ever heard of. They're run by people, people who may think they're effectively immortal. But everyone, from the Caesar of Rome to the owner of the Houston Astros to that guy that's at White Castle every time you walk in there, will one day be gone, and there is literally nothing they can do to stop it.

The ideas in the "essay" i just wrote are ones that have been repeated ad infitum, but think of them as the opening of a conversation. Perhaps the start of a conversation with yourself, or a conversation with other people. Like I said, these thoughts have been swimming around in my head for weeks, and I wanted to get them all out for the world to see. Let me know your thoughts!

tl;dr: You get old and die eventually.